Habits of analysis, though fatal to spontaneous production, were favourable, or rather were necessary, to the growth of a new philosophy. After the exhaustion of every limited idealism, there remained that highest idealisation which is the reduction of all past experience to a method available for the guidance of all future action. To accomplish this last enterprise it was necessary that a single individual should gather up in himself the spirit diffused through a whole people, bestowing on it by that very concentration the capability of an infinitely wider extension when its provisional representative should have passed away from the scene. Socrates represents the popular Athenian character much as Richardson, in a different sphere, represents the English middle-class character—represents it, that is to say, elevated into transcendent genius. Except this elevation, there was nothing anomalous about him. If he was exclusively critical, rationalising, unadventurous, prosaic; in a word, as the German historians say, something of a Philistine; so, we may suspect, were the mass of his countrymen. His illustrations were taken from such plebeian employments as cattle-breeding, cobbling, weaving, and sailoring. These were his ‘touches of things common’ which at last ‘rose to touch the spheres.’ He both practised and inculcated virtues, the value of which is especially evident in humble life—frugality and endurance. But he also represents the Dêmos in its sovereign capacity as legislator and judge. Without aspiring to be an orator or statesman, he reserves the ultimate power of arbitration and election. He submits candidates for office to a severe scrutiny, and demands from all men an even stricter account of their lives than retiring magistrates had to give of their conduct, when in power, to the people. He applies the judicial method of cross-examination to the detection of error, and the parliamentary method of joint deliberation to the discovery of truth. He follows out the democratic principles of free speech and self-government, by submitting every question that arises to public discussion, and insisting on no conclusion that does not command the willing assent of his audience. Finally, his conversation, popular in form, was popular also in this respect, that everybody who chose to listen might have the benefit of it gratuitously. Here we have a great change from the scornful dogmatism of Heracleitus, and the virtually oligarchic exclusiveness of the teachers who demanded high fees for their instruction.